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The Girls Who Haven’t Come Home

Vernice Hill’s children were taken from her after she left them alone to visit a friend.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The last time they took Vernice Hill’s children away, the time they didn’t give them all back, was the afternoon she went to see her neighbor. Ms. Hill lives in a hulking building on East 188th Street, in a frayed neighborhood in the Bronx. It was May 1, 2005.

Inside her apartment, her two little girls, 3 and 6, were napping. Her two teenage boys, Jmapie, 13, and Matthew, 15, were supposed to be tidying up their room. Around noon, Ms. Hill went to catch up with a frail woman she gossiped with. First, she had some beers. A pot of neck bones and kidney beans simmered on the stove.

Ms. Hill figures she was gone at best an hour. (The police report suggested several hours.) Her keys lay inside. When she returned, she banged on the door and got no response. Rather than clean their room, the boys had gone out — Matthew to the park to play basketball and Jmapie downstairs to a friend’s.

Ms. Hill asked her neighbor to call 911. Firefighters and the police came and pried open the door.

When the officers wouldn’t let Ms. Hill in, she got cross. The police report quoted her as saying, “If you want my kids, take them,” and then punctuating that with a vulgarity.

The report presented a dismal summation: an inebriated mother, a filthy apartment infested with roaches and spiders; two little girls, who, when awakened, complained of hunger and of being alone for a long time. (Ms. Hill said her apartment “wasn’t the best, but not that bad.”)

An ambulance took the girls, who will be identified by their initials, J. and N., to protect their privacy, to the hospital. The brothers saw their sisters and went along. The police arrested Ms. Hill on child endangerment charges.

Though the boys gave authorities the name of an aunt, she wasn’t allowed to take them because she had five children of her own. Ms. Hill has plenty of relatives, the sort who in better-off families can mind children when trouble brews. But Ms. Hill’s relatives were themselves overwhelmed.

The criminal charges ultimately were dismissed. Yet her children were taken, and a poor family was plunged into the vortex of the foster care system, a destination it had visited before and where it still resides.

By mid-2008, Ms. Hill was barred from seeing her daughters, even though her sons had come home and were faring well. The girls have still not been returned. She and her advocates feel that an unresponsive system failed to help her repair her crumpled life and keep her family together.

The city’s child welfare system, overseen by the Administration for Children’s Services, remains one of the most treacherous corners of social policy, a long troubled universe hobbled by defective approaches and strained services. Foster care is essentially a poverty business.

Ms. Hill’s case has unfolded at a time when New York’s foster care census has been falling, to less than 13,000 this year, its lowest point in decades, well beneath the peak of nearly 50,000 in 1992 when the crack epidemic exploded the population. Policies are increasingly aimed at keeping families intact, and there has been a shift in the balance between the rights of children and the rights of parents, as parents have obtained better legal representation.

The median length of time spent in foster care for children who eventually get adopted is now about four and a half years, an eternity in the fragile life of a child. Ms. Hill’s case has exceeded eight years.

The case gets at the elemental question of who deserves to keep their children. And it is about the creeping passage of time. It is a case with so many contours that it now seems to defy a just solution.

“This is a case where the confluence of circumstances would drive a Solomon over the edge,” said Steven Banks, the attorney-in-chief of the Legal Aid Society, which until recently represented all of the children in the matter.

A Rough Start

Vernice Hill’s apartment is a worn, overstuffed three-bedroom with lime-colored walls. Goldfish swish around in a large tank. She is 48, and bears the accumulated scars of a ragged, unpretty life. She can be coarse, tart, remote. She admits to poor judgment with men. All told, she has six children. She drank heavily for too long. But the law, squishy as it is, doesn’t specify that you need to be an ideal parent to keep your children.

Ms. Hill grew up in Brooklyn, in a cramped, impoverished household, among six full siblings and five half-siblings from a prior relationship of her father’s. Her parents separated when she was about 8. When she was 12, she moved with her mother and siblings to the Bronx.

She got pregnant when she was 15, sending her life along a stuttering trajectory.

Ms. Hill gave birth to a daughter, Nieama, in 1980 and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. One day, while Ms. Hill was at the store, she said, her mother called the police to turn the baby over to child welfare. It took Ms. Hill months to get her back. Her mother threw them out of the house, and they lived with friends and at a shelter. Looking back, Ms. Hill said, “I started life at too young an age. I was a child taking care of a child.”

For about eight years, she bounced between St. Thomas and St. Croix, living with Nieama’s father and his relatives. They broke up, and she returned to New York in 1988, landing again with Nieama in homeless shelters. Ms. Hill found her way into trouble and had some arrests she is ashamed of. She found sporadic work at a food cart and a bar. She got involved with a shelter security guard and had Matthew and Jmapie with him. Soon, the father moved on. She went on public assistance, her main support for most of her life, and was placed in subsidized housing.

In the early 1990s, she again came to the notice of child welfare. There were a couple of brief foster care removals. A continuing spat involving a neighbor, excessive drinking and leaving her children alone resulted in the neighbor calling the authorities about Ms. Hill in early 1994; her three children were removed for a short period.

Around this time, she met Isaac McDonald. He was a mechanic. Soon, he moved in with her. He had a son in Jamaica but wanted more children. Against her better judgment, Ms. Hill had a son, Darnell, in 1995, and then N. in 1999 and J. in 2001 with Mr. McDonald.

Both Ms. Hill and Mr. McDonald were heavy drinkers, and booze cost him a garage he opened, he said. Ms. Hill acknowledges that it was not easy being a mother. “It was like my hair was being pulled all different ways,” she said.

A succession of episodes built up a deeper history with child-welfare officials.

In 1999, Ms. Hill quarreled with a woman in her building after one of Ms. Hill’s sons said the neighbor cursed at him. She said the woman hit her with a stick. Ms. Hill got a kitchen knife. The police arrested them both, and Matthew, Jmapie, Darnell and N. went into foster care for 22 months. Four months after they returned, a neighbor reported that N. had a bruise on her cheek — Ms. Hill said it resulted from an accident with a bike — and the children were removed again briefly.

In July 2002, Ms. Hill and Mr. McDonald got into a brawl outside their building and were arrested. Jmapie and Matthew were at camp, and Ms. Hill’s mother took the three other young children. After a month, while Ms. Hill was still in jail, her mother notified child welfare that the children were too much for her, and they re-entered foster care. Jmapie and Matthew were allowed to stay with Ms. Hill. Ms. Hill and Mr. McDonald split up.

In March 2003, J. and N. were returned to Ms. Hill, but A.C.S. said Darnell had special needs, and he was still in foster care in May 2005, when Ms. Hill’s family once again dissolved into the solvent of Bronx County Family Court.

Changing Stories

The case was given to the Children’s Village, a respected private agency dating back to 1851. Ms. Hill was ordered to complete a constellation of programs: drug abuse treatment, parental skills training, and individual and group therapy. Visitation schedules with the children were arranged.

Jmapie and Matthew went to one foster home, the two girls to another. Tensions developed between the boys and their foster family, and after two months, they were moved to a residential treatment center in Westchester.

Toward the end of 2005, court records show, everything pointed to the children being returned to Ms. Hill.

Then friction arose with the foster mother who had N. and J. In March 2006, the girls were moved to a new home, a development that sent the case lurching in a new direction.

The new family, who in the interest of the girls’ privacy will be identified by the initial of their surname, L., lived in Harlem and were appealing foster parents. According to case documents, he is now 75, a retired nursing aide and hospital police officer. His wife is 46 and no longer works for health reasons. During a previous marriage, she was devastated when she lost a baby 10 days after birth. They listed income of $52,000. They bought the girls new clothes and toys, and lavished them with attention.

The very next visit with Ms. Hill, J. was uninterested in seeing her mother. She said she preferred to be with her foster parents.

But at a subsequent visit, according to court testimony, J. cried and repeatedly begged Ms. Hill to take her home.

Mr. and Mrs. L. would not comment, nor would Craig Marshall, the current lawyer for the girls.

In July 2006, the girls spent the day at Ms. Hill’s home, and N., then 7, went to the store to buy soda, then had trouble getting back into the building. Ms. Hill said older friends accompanied her; N. told her caseworker she went alone. The agency suspended home visits for months. The caseworker later testified that he looked into the incident but made no notes in the file.

The following month, Darnell, Jmapie and Matthew were returned to Ms. Hill. They never went back into foster care.

Photo

One of Vernice Hill’s daughters, J., photographed years ago. Ms. Hill's daughters J. and N. have been in foster care the last eight years. Despite fighting for them in court, Ms. Hill has not been able to regain custody.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The intention, Ms. Hill said she was told, was for a staggered return of the children, the boys first, the girls next. Ms. Hill saw her family as “like a pie and you’ve got two pieces missing.”

The possibility of the girls being entrusted to Mr. McDonald or Nieama Baxter, Ms. Hill’s oldest child, was raised, but evaporated.

As time passed, the girls seemed increasingly smitten with their new setting. Records show the foster parents took the girls to Disney World, and gave them for Christmas what the girls summarized as everything that they asked for.

In time, the foster family expressed interest in adopting them. For the most part, caseworker reports were quite positive, and the Children’s Village agreed. Ms. Hill was firmly opposed. In April 2008, the Children’s Village filed a petition to terminate Ms. Hill’s parental rights.

This happened even though a caseworker — one of a revolving cast — testified that visits with Ms. Hill were going well.

That same month, without a court order, the agency halted visits between the girls and Ms. Hill, after it got a report from a therapist. The therapist wrote that the foster mother said the girls had been physically abused by Ms. Hill. The report said the girls felt anxious and threatened around their mother and wanted to stop seeing her. The therapist recommended that visits end. She never spoke to Ms. Hill.

Ms. Hill said she was also told by her caseworker that her daughters didn’t want letters, gifts or phone calls from her.

At this point, Ms. Hill had a new lawyer, Stacy Charland from the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit group that represents most of the indigent parents in Bronx foster care cases. She challenged the agency’s decision. In early September 2008, a court referee ruled that the agency had to begin “therapeutic visits” between Ms. Hill and her daughters.

Months passed without visits. Ms. Charland protested, and the matter returned to the referee. A new therapist was seeing the girls, and she reported that both girls said they had been hit excessively by their mother. N. spoke of being struck on her leg years ago with a broomstick. At the therapist’s request, N. testified by video before the referee. According to the referee’s notes, N. said she had been hit by Ms. Hill and her brothers. She also mentioned bad memories of having to clean the house.

The accounts of the girls have fluctuated. Early on, N. told her caseworker that her mother hated her and hit her, then a few months later no longer said those things. At one point, she said she had been hit a lot but that J. never had, and said, “That’s not fair.” J. initially said she didn’t want to see her mother because of how she treated N. Later, both said they were physically abused by Ms. Hill. At one point, N. said that while with her foster parents, J. was mean to her and hit her.

How reliable are the words of young children? What weight should be given to their memories? These questions were threads that ran through everything.

Ms. Hill denies the allegations, and nothing in the court records suggests they were ever fully investigated.

One of the case’s peculiarities is that family therapy was ordered between the girls and the foster family but never between Ms. Hill and her daughters.

“It’s very odd,” Ms. Charland said, “that two girls would say I never want to see anybody in my family ever again.”

Were they genuinely afraid of their mother? Or had they simply found a nicer place to live? Or both?

Mr. Charland said she felt that the case had morphed into a “beauty contest” and an exercise in “social engineering.”

A social worker at the Bronx Defenders, Jenny Crawford, assisted Ms. Hill from early on and has remained an ally. “She is not the perfect mom,” said Ms. Crawford, now at Columbia University’s School of Social Work as associate director of field education. “The law doesn’t require you to be an outstanding parent. You don’t have to be teaching your child sign language, crawling around with the kids. You have to be an adequate parent. I know her very well. I know she loves her children very dearly.”

In June 2009, the court referee suspended visits indefinitely. All contact ended between the girls and Ms. Hill, their father and their siblings. Their biological family was essentially erased from the girls’ lives.

Ms. Hill could raise her three sons, but not see her daughters. In a sense, the system found her to be three-fifths of an acceptable mother.

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The same month as that ruling, Mr. and Mrs. L. moved to Delaware with the girls. They did so illegally, without obtaining the necessary approvals from New York State and Delaware child-welfare authorities, nor court blessing. Not until four months after they left did Ms. Hill and Ms. Charland even know they had moved.

Ms. Charland fruitlessly objected. The states subsequently granted approval, though the court never sanctioned the move. Evidently, the assumption was so strong that the girls would be adopted that conventions like following the law no longer mattered.

Days banged into one another, and the passage of time became a force shaping the narrative. The girls now lived some 150 miles away, their identity increasingly being carved by their foster parents.

Everything hinged on the petition to terminate Ms. Hill’s parental rights. A year passed as it inched through the staggering Family Court backlog.

Judging a Mother

Darnell interrupted his homework, plunked himself down barefoot in the living room. He’s 17, in high school. He would like to become a veterinarian. He’s the only child living with Ms. Hill.

Like his older siblings, he has mixed memories of foster care. Some decent times, some very bad ones. He recounted how he “changed up my act,” behaving well, being unruly, anything he thought would get him returned to his mother.

“I was so happy when I came home,” he said. “My smile was so big.”

Matthew Hill, now 23, is an assistant manager at a Foot Locker in Manhattan. He shares an apartment with his brother Jmapie, 21, who works in the kitchen at Ruby Tuesday in Times Square.

None of her sons thinks Ms. Hill has been ideal, but their affection for her is deep. “She tried her best,” Matthew said.

“Foster care is not a place you want to be, because it’s not your family,” he added. Jmapie recalled the drinking, the fights between his mother and Mr. McDonald: “They’d fight over what’s two times two.”

How would he sum her up? “She was always a good mother,” he said. “We always needed stuff. But she cared for us.”

Did she hit her kids? When they disobeyed her, got rowdy and wouldn’t listen, she readily admits she spanked them with her hand or a belt. “What parent doesn’t?” she said. “But I didn’t abuse them.”

Her other children support her on that. Mr. McDonald, who is on poor terms with Ms. Hill nowadays, describes her as “a tough woman, not a mother who pampers her kids.” She could be reproachful, he said, but she was never abusive.

As he sees it, “the children left their mother very young. When you go to a place where it’s all comfortable and they take you places, you don’t want to ever leave there.”

He wants Ms. Hill to get the girls back. He wants them to know him. “Oh my God, I do,” he said. He began to weep.

Avi Klein, a therapist who treated Ms. Hill, said he has been especially heartbroken by this case. He has been troubled about the absence of confirmation of what the girls have claimed, about what he believes are injustices against Ms. Hill.

“She’s not going to be the mother of the year,” he said. “But this woman is not a homicidal murderer. It’s such a stupid outcome. This one took the cake for me.”

Photo

Ms. Hill has been barred from seeing her daughters since 2008, yet in 2011, an agency requested to have her parental rights terminated, citing, in part, that she had not visited the children in the six months prior.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Nieama Baxter, now 33, has known her mother’s dented life the longest. She always pitched in, packing bags in the supermarket from the age of 10, later toiling at McDonald’s. When she was 14, strains developed with her mother. “I hated that she was having babies and didn’t have the means to take care of them,” she said. When Darnell was born, she moved out to live with a girlfriend of an uncle.

She went on to graduate from college and, until losing her job late last year, had been a social worker helping homeless people with H.I.V. She is looking for a new position. She has three children of her own. Though she split up with the father, he helps raise them.

She is devoted to her mother now. She wishes Ms. Hill had made better choices, but feels adult life swallowed her up before she knew how to navigate its sharp edges.

“She’s a good mom,” she said. “She’s not the best. But she’s O.K. I didn’t know you had to be more than O.K.”

An Overwhelmed System

The petition to terminate Vernice Hill’s parental rights to her daughters was filed on April 8, 2008. The trial began on Oct. 26, 2009. Action comes frightfully slow in beleaguered Family Court. When this action came before Judge Gayle Roberts, she was by the court’s estimate juggling 800 to 1,000 cases.

It was a weighty matter. It is not for nothing that removing parental rights is called the civil death penalty.

Cases in the Bronx are notorious for creeping along in choppy fashion — a few hours now, a few hours a month later, a few hours three months after that.

The verdict came in June 2011. From beginning to end, three years passed. Not because of haystacks of evidence or a hefty witness list. There was one witness. One.

His name was Aziah Hester, the caseworker assigned until December 2006. In its petition, the Children’s Village claimed Ms. Hill “permanently neglected” the girls by, among other things, not visiting them regularly, not supervising them and not bettering her parenting skills.

But under cross-examination by Stacy Charland, Ms. Hill’s lawyer, Mr. Hester backtracked. Many visits he mentioned were not recorded in case files. Records inexplicably didn’t exist for stretches of several months. He acknowledged that most visits went well and that some troubled visits he testified to may not have even happened.

Though he initially said that Ms. Hill exhibited deficient parenting skills during most visits, he later admitted this happened only a few times. He first said she canceled as many as half of her visits during a five-month period in 2006, then later said she had missed none.

He acknowledged that at many visits the girls were elated to see their mother, hugging and kissing her. Ms. Hill brought gifts; she played and sang with the girls. Mr. Hester said Ms. Hill often told him how eager she was for them to return home.

Mr. Hester testified that at a point when the only thing standing in the way of the girls doing so was more frequent contact between them and Ms. Hill, the agency actually scaled back the visits it offered her.

It was shown that Ms. Hill did everything asked of her — completing an alcohol treatment program, two parenting skills classes and individual counseling — and that she received positive feedback from all these programs.

The June 13, 2011, ruling by Judge Roberts denied the petition and was unsparing toward the agency. She dismissed Mr. Hester as not credible. She pointed out that if Ms. Hill’s parenting skills were so faulty that the agency was loath to increase unsupervised contact with her daughters, “there would be no justification for sending the boys home on trial discharge. Yet, this is exactly what the agency did.”

She spoke of the “amazing hypocrisy” of some of the agency’s reasoning. She further said that it was the agency’s responsibility to develop a plan for services that could lead to reunification, but “there is no indication that Ms. Hill was provided any services directed at or appropriate to the goal of family reunification.”

Though he said he could not address the specifics of this case, Ronald E. Richter, the commissioner of A.C.S., said, “Our ultimate responsibility is always to protect the safety of children and promote their well-being, which is what we have done in this complicated case despite its length. We are continuously working with our foster care agencies to improve how we do our work.”

Jeremy Kohomban, the chief executive of the Children’s Village, also said he could not get into the details of the case. He did say about the court ruling: “Shame on us for not coming before the judge with a case that gave us credit for the work we do.” He stressed that his agency’s goal was to keep families unified, but that the safety of children was paramount.

If the decision constituted a victory for Ms. Hill, it was illusory.

In October 2011, the Children’s Village filed a fresh action to terminate parental rights, citing abandonment and permanent neglect. Among other things, it said that Ms. Hill didn’t stay in sufficient contact with the agency and that she abandoned her daughters for more than six months preceding the filing and did not visit them “although able to do so and not prevented or discouraged from doing so.” The latter claim is bizarre, as she has not been allowed to see the children since April 2008.

The most recent evaluation of the girls by a psychologist, who did not speak to Ms. Hill or her sons, concluded both girls suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and should have no contact with their mother.

Ms. Hill made intermittent efforts to get word to the girls. Letters were returned unopened. An Easter basket was rebuffed. She requested pictures of them but was told that was not possible. She sent J. a birthday card with a $15 gift certificate, but it came back. A request was made to let them communicate with their siblings through Facebook or Twitter. No.

The new petition to end Ms. Hill’s rights crawled along. The trial began on June 5, two years since the prior ruling. Five years since Ms. Hill was allowed contact with her daughters.

Imagining a Future

On East 188th Street, a shivering wind funneled through the streets. It was about to pour. Vernice Hill was indoors. Spent from the quest to reunite her splintered family, she leaves her apartment maybe once or twice a week. Her knees are weak. She has diabetes.

Days drag by. She said she has stopped drinking. “It just got old,” she said. “I saw what the court system did to me, and I said I’ve got to be sober to keep an eye on this.”

She’s twitchy, her nerves bad. She fights depression.

“This whole thing has driven me away from people,” she said. “I don’t have friends. It’s shutting me down. I’m trying to get back on my feet, but it’s not happening. I sit and worry. I stress.”

She watches television, listens to music. She likes movies, the soaps, “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” A boyfriend who drives a sanitation truck stops by once or twice a week. Nieama visits all the time, as do the grandchildren, to prop up her spirits.

She recognizes the reality. Her two young daughters who went to live elsewhere in May 2005 and have not come back are different people by now. They are 11 and 14. They have lived without her for much longer than they have lived with her. She doesn’t know their favorite songs or colors or television shows or how they like to do their hair. To a large extent, they are strangers.

She knows that. She also wants to believe in a new beginning: “I feel if they come back, they’ll just bounce right back. They’re my kids.”

What advice would she give them? “Same advice I give everyone, the advice I never followed,” she said. “Go to school and stay in there.”

So where’s the solution? Leave the girls with the family with whom they have bonded? Return them to the mother who gave them life?

Ms. Hill has rerun those questions in her mind. “If the girls told me they want to stay where they are, I would have to leave them,” she said. “I have to think about their feelings. But they have to tell it right to me. And they have to know we’re here. That they have brothers and sisters that care for them. That they have a mother who loves them.”

If she saw them now, what would she say to them?

“I don’t even know,” she said. “I’d just stand there and give them a hug. I’d give them the biggest hug in the world.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2013, on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Girls Who Haven’t Come Home. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe